A cold, icy tundra will mark the new setting for the fourth season of True Detective (subtitled Night Country), headed by showrunner and director, Issa López, who isn’t new to dark, intense stories. Before she brought Jodie Foster and Kali Reis together to investigate a mystery, Lopez made 2017’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, a horror film about orphaned kids who have lost their families to cartel violence and must rely on each other to survive. It’s not her first movie, but it is her first horror film, a strange and tragic dark fantasy that can bring to mind the movies of Guillermo Del Toro, where magical realism places real-world conflicts alongside the realm of fairy tales. A vicious cartel is one threat the kids face, along with being haunted by ghosts and magical wishes that bring only more horror. In anticipation of the return of True Detective, after yet another long hiatus for the crime anthology, Tigers Are Not Afraid is a Spanish-language dark fantasy that shows what Issa López may bring to Night Country.

What Is ‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’ About?

Estrella (Paolo Lara) is a young girl who has a vivid imagination that she uses while at school for writing stories. Sudden cartel-related gunfire occurs, closing down her school indefinitely, but not before her teacher hands Estrella three broken pieces of chalk, telling her it will grant three wishes. The teacher does this to keep Estrella calm, but the girl’s life has irreversibly changed. Without school, she goes home and can’t find her mother, not realizing her only parent is missing due to the local cartel and human trafficking ring, “Los Huascas.” With nowhere to go and no one else to turn to, Estrella finds herself an orphan like the young boys who live in her neighborhood and have joined a gang.

Led by Shine (Juan Ramón López), these young lives are forced to unite in confronting the death that surrounds them, but not everyone will make it out safely. While Tigers Are Not Afraid never confirms whether the fantasy world exists in Estrella’s mind, it’s grounded by the daily threats that are pulled from real life. López wrote and directed many Spanish comedies until she finally had the chance to make this project, inspired by the overlooked stories of cartel violence.

Issa López Knows How to Write Gritty Crime Drama

In an EW interview, López talked about researching for a project on the origins of drug cartels during World War II. She learned from journalists and sociologists about the victims in the current day who aren’t discussed, saying,

“Nobody is talking about these kids, and like anywhere in the world, it affects children. It displaces them, it harms them, it leaves them on their own, and nobody’s telling their stories. So, that stuck with me, and then somewhere else I read about parts of towns have become ghost towns, and it felt so appealing to put these children that are stranded, taking over one ghost town. This was my opportunity to go into my favorite thing, which is genre, and I just went for it.”

True Detective is heavily influenced by noir films, depicting a morbid world that the lead characters investigate, delving further into the atrocities happening in the sweltering Louisana of Season 1. López has created a dark world that characters are forced to deal with through the narcos storyline that is pervasive in this unnamed Mexican city.

The violence from the active drug war has left the area nearly deserted, where the main group of kids is stuck and forced to become their own guardians. The cartel name, “Huascas,” translates to “drunkenness,” and is full of male gang members who, even when sober, are unruly and trigger-happy without concern about who they target. The drug kingpin Chino (played by Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Tenoch Huerta) holds power over Los Huascas, but also, more dangerously, is a powerful, corrupt politician himself who is just as reckless and toxic as the men he gives orders to. The local police won’t do anything to help the kids, either out of fear or cooperation with Chino. This widespread corruption aligns with the infection that spread throughout Season 1 of True Detective, where the Tuttle family tree placed its relatives into high-ranking positions in politics and religion, with malevolent intentions.

To build up the gritty world of Tigers, López films it in a handheld style to capture everything as if it were a documentary. This grounds the threat the kids face, especially when the Huascas men will kill children without hesitation, and Lopez doesn’t just go for shock value when a young life is taken, she lingers on the sadness of the loss. The crime genre is important to Tigers Are Not Afraid for how Issa López wants to talk about the rampant cartel violence that remains a problem, along with the casualties and collateral damage it leaves behind — but Tigers is also a horror story where children are constantly endangered.

How Scary Movies Treat Children

Yes, kids are the terrifying monsters in The Omen (1976) and Orphan (2009), but in other horror movies, they are the victims. It used to be rare to see young characters harmed in the genre, but that taboo is starting to dissolve. In Suspiria (1977), director Dario Argento had different plans for who to cast in the supernatural horror movie set in a German ballet school. Many times, the dialogue is child-like, which sounds odd coming from the young adult women that were cast, and just as odd are the doorknobs that come at their eye level. This was all on purpose, Argento originally wanted to cast young girls as the students of the academy secretly run by witches. The idea was changed (while the child-like theme remained), and it isn’t hard to see why the producers felt uneasy about it, one of the students is attacked and falls into a pit of razor wire while trying to escape, sounding exactly as gruesome as it looks. Then, in two Stephen King film adaptations, IT and Doctor Sleep, the children are most definitely not all right.

In these King adaptations, several of the young characters are killed off in nightmarish ways: A clown lurking in the sewer, chomps down onto a boy’s arm, before dragging him into a subterranean lair. and when A vicious vampire hunts down and tortures children to feast on their psychic gifts. What makes the deaths in Tigers Are Not Afraid even more brutal, is the lack of supernatural monsters; instead, the adults are responsible, committing bloodshed out of rage or revenge. There is a dark fantasy influence to Suspiria and King’s works, just like there is in Tigers Are Not Afraid and this is how Issa López turns her movie into a unique experience, as viewers might be more familiar with cartel stories where they can root for Pedro Pascal to catch the bad guys in Narcos.

‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’ Uses Magical Realism to Tackle Real-World Horrors

López said in a Vanity Fair interview how she planned Night Country as a “dark mirror” to Season 1 and throughout that entry in the anthology series, there is the underlying occult imagery. The noir genre that permeates the season eventually gives way to horror, with the Tuttle family cult, which uses figures or locations like The Yellow King and Carcosa in their ritual murders. Homicide detectives Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) see vivid, spooky graffiti and due to heavy drug use in the past, Cohle hallucinates a ritualistic symbol in the sky made from a flock of birds. There is a rational explanation to ensure the supernatural is atmospheric rather than physical manifestations, which is what Tigers Are Not Afraid does to stand apart from other cartel dramas. López never steers it into high fantasy where magic is explained to be authentic. Together with the documentary style, she brings the viewers and the main group of kids into a strange world where reality and fantasy seem to coexist.

Issa López did an interview with Gizmodo where she recalled a review Tigers got that called it, “the best Guillermo del Toro movie he never made.” There is plenty of truth to this. Magical realism is when fantastical characters or settings are portrayed in a realistic way. Del Toro loves working in this genre, but López has her own style to make Tigers feel distinctly hers. It starts when Estrella walks past the dead body of yet another cartel victim, without realizing the blood trail actively following her back home. This line of blood continues to appear, materializing like an omen for the next tragedy or warning of violence that will come to the girl.

And when Estrella misses her mom too much while alone in the house, she uses one of the three chalk pieces to make a wish to see her again. It grants her this wish but with terrible results. Estrella is visited by her mother, getting haunted by her bloody corpse, another victim of Los Huascas. Tigers Are Not Afraid becomes a modern fairy tale, but it never forgets the horror is rooted in the rampant cartel violence, so the kids’ imagination, especially Estrella’s, is a survival tool for how they avoid the Huascas cartel — but they can’t stay hidden for long.

Estrella and Shine Are at Odds in ‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’

Before the upcoming Jodie Foster-Kali Reis duo, with their complex relationship in Night Country, there is the tension-filled pairing in Tigers. Estrella and Shine have a rocky bond due to Shine’s sexism as a boy gang leader. Even when Estrella gets to join, Shine is always distant or easily bothered by her — the male characters of this story are all products of toxic masculinity, after all. Shine thinks the only way he can “be a man” is to kill a Huascas gang member, in stark contrast to Estrella, who has been forced into horrible circumstances and recoils when she must inflict violence with her hands. But the two slowly connect over their shared trauma and effort to survive.

No matter how frustrated Shine may get, or how he makes the other boys feel the same about Estrella, she faces a more vicious misogyny by the cartel that wants to find her. Shine is an important character, but this is Estrella’s story, and she is a resilient young girl. It makes for a gut-wrenching performance by Paolo Lara, who, like the actors playing Shine and the boys, never acted previously. If this is the kind of talent Issa López can get out of a young cast, Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are in safe hands.

Tigers Are Not Afraid is not your typical horror movie, it might have more in common with the atypical genre fare like The Babadook (2014), where the nightmare fuel might be found in the supernatural, but the real fear comes from a human crisis spiraling out of control. It feels inspired by Guillermo Del Toro’s filmography, but it’s nowhere near as fantastical as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) where escaping into a fantasy world, with a bewitching film score and lush colors, is preferable to dreary Francoist Spain. Issa López goes in a bleaker direction. There is hope in Tigers Are Not Afraid, but the tragic childhoods of Estrella, Shine, and the other boys make for a raw and haunting story that makes for the perfect watch as we wait for Night Country which premieres on HBO this Sunday.